Queens, New York, is famously known as the home of the New York Mets and where tennis legends are crowned at the U.S. Open. But New York City's largest borough is also where home sale prices have been rising the most over the past year.
Queens led the nation in highest year-over-year home sale price hikes, according to new data from Homes.com. Median prices there grew 19% from $659,000 in January 2024 to $785,000 last month. The median indicates the middle of a range, with the same number higher and lower.
Rounding out the top three markets with the highest price jumps are Orange, California, which saw a $1 million to $1.2 million bump, and Providence, Rhode Island, which grew from $370,000 to $428,000 during the same time span.
Prices are rising in Queens, in part because the area has seen about 40 new condominium buildings open within the last year, Alana Lindsay, a real estate agent at Coldwell Banker Warburg, said in an interview. The most recent example is a seven-story condo building with 98 units in the Forest Hills neighborhood called The Austin, Lindsay added.
"These new development launches have been pushing the price points higher, with many starting at $800,000 or more," she said.
The Queens market is dominated by single-family home and co-op sales, mostly from buyers who love the racial diversity the area offers and "have strong family ties to Queens and have been renters here for a very long time," Lindsay said.
"For these reasons, a lot of the buyers that I have been working with do not want to leave the borough, even if it means potentially upping their budget just a bit," Lindsay said.
Homes.com's data captures U.S. cities with a population of 100,000 or more and where the local market saw at least 25 transactions in the past year. The data zeroes in on only single-family homes, ignoring transactions of condominiums and co-ops.
Other cities with significant home sale price increases include 15% each in Irvine, California; Miami; and Hartford, Connecticut, as well as 14% in Edison, New Jersey; and West Palm Beach, Florida. Detroit saw a 13% increase in prices.
There's an exhaustive list of reasons why prices in Edison, New Jersey, have jumped, Mary Churchill, a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker, said in an interview. Homebuyers are moving there because it offers a 40-minute train ride to New York City, she said. But as more people move to Edison, the number of available homes for sale is shrinking, thus creating intense demand, she added.
Home construction companies have been taking advantage of Edison's housing demand, Churchill said. Historically, neighborhoods in Edison have been lined with older homes built between 1950 and 1970, but that's starting to change, she said.
“Builders, developers and flippers are buying old homes and knocking them completely down and building brand new ones,” Churchill said, adding that the new homes are being priced at $1 million or more.
Pandemic effect
Sale prices are growing because the quest for buying a home exploded during the pandemic and it hasn't cooled since, economists have said. Because of that, prices are climbing faster than they ever have in U.S. history, said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS.
"When the pandemic hit, people were at home, and home took on this broader meaning — more than just where you slept," Sturtevant said in an interview. "New construction grounded to a halt and there was very fast demand and very limited supply."
Housing inventory is starting to improve this year, according to economists, but there's still an uphill battle to generate enough homes for Americans looking to buy.
"We haven't seen the end of it because inventory is still very low and pent-up demand is still very high," Sturtevant said. "For the foreseeable future, we're going to be in a tight inventory environment."
Inventory has been particularly tight in Rhode Island, the state that consistently ranks last in new residential construction. Even though the state lacks new homes, Rhode Island is experiencing more residents who have taken jobs in Massachusetts, according to Tyler Cote, the managing partner for Rhode Island-based Cote Partners Realty. The influx of new residents likely explains why median prices in Providence grew 16% on an annual basis, according to Homes.com data.
"There's a lot of folks who — for work or other reasons — want to be in the Boston area, but as they look around, they notice that they get more bang for your buck in Providence," Cote said. "All of those factors have led to prices continuing to rise with no signs of stopping in the near future."